The Daily News opinion blog

Main menu

Post navigation

Now Playing Sheen & Gadaffi: Tragedy and Horror

Some weeks ago a news reporter for LA channel 2 seemed tohave suffered a stroke on air. Though it turned out to be a complex migraine, many neurologists thought that the tape could have served as a valuable diagnostic tool, an instructional tape for emergency docs and EMTs. The poor reporter was spouting gibberish, making no sense and seemed utterly lost. Thankfully, she recovered.

However, if one is looking for a diagnostic tape to instruct emergency personnel in evaluating mental breakdowns, this week provided two horrifying, if edifying, examples. Right in front of our eyes–again and again and yet again–is Charlie Sheen. Though he may think of himself as a wild exception to all the rules, an untamed eccentric only playing mad like Randall McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he is, in fact, quite mad. He is literally the poster boy for an addled addict. Wonderful actor though he is, he could not fake this terrible fugue from reality. Were he, as an actor, to study the many tapes of this week, he might see a character gone mad. He is a tragic role model.

But he is not alone on the stage. He shares it with Muarmar Gadaffi, whose behavior and misbehavior might be considered daffy if he were not perpetrating such hellfire and death on his own people. Usually just considered strange, this week he is detached from reality and any sense of morality or shared humanity.

What they share in common as walking diagnostic tools are over the top expressions of grandiosity, manic energy, agitation, anger, a sense of persecution and total denial that they are in denial of the reality the rest of the world shares. They both project an invincibility that fails to acknowledge the danger they are in.

Watch the grand gestures, the wild stares and the dismissive waving away of reality. See the threats for what they are–frenzied fear. Charlie threatens, “Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.”
Struggling to keep up is Muarmar Gadaffi who proclaims, “I am much bigger than any rank, for those who are talking about rank, I am a fighter. I am like the Queen of England.” Charlie then pushed for first place and royalty with, “I’m extremely old-fashioned, I’m a nobleman, I’m chivalrous.” Either one could have uttered, “These resentments, they are the rocket fuel that lives in the tip of my saber,” but it was, in fact, our poor Charlie.

There is something that draws us to human train wrecks, this schadenfreude makes us shudder and thrill at the same time. There is, what Aristotle characterizes as the tragic impulses to withdraw in horror and approach in pity. Gadaffi gets no pity, only horror and revulsion. He is a monster. Mad yes, but a monster undeserving of pity. Charlie Sheen is a tragedy–a not so slow-motion wreck decompensating before our eyes. We will always watch this kind of spectacle and the cameras will always be willing to put them on the screen. But there is the frustration. We can see it. We can diagnose it and name it, but we are helpless to fix the madness. We can try to protect Charlie’s family and Gadaffi’s country. But we can’t save them.